"Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it."
Edmund Burke. What happened on this Day in History?

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

This Day in History: Jul 30, 1898: Henry Moore born

English sculptor Henry Moore is born in Castleford,
Yorkshire, on July 30, 1898. The son of a coal miner, he overcame early
criticism of his work to become one of the most acclaimed sculptors of
the 20th century. His majestic, semi-abstract sculptures of the human
figure are characterized by their smooth, organic shape and often
include empty hollows that evoke form as meaningfully as solid mass.

The
seventh of eight children, Moore grew up in the small coal-mining town
of Castleford in northern England. His father was an ambitious man who
taught himself advanced mathematics in order to rise from ordinary miner
to the position of mining engineer. Moore decided he wanted to become a
sculptor at age 11, after hearing a Sunday school story about
Michelangelo. He served in France during World War I
and in 1917 was injured in a gas attack. After being demobilized in
1919, he won a veteran's grant to study at the Leeds School of Art in
West Yorkshire. In 1921, he was awarded a scholarship to study at the
Royal College of Art in London.

At London's libraries and museums,
he studied Egyptian, Etruscan, Pre-Columbian, Oceanic, and African
sculpture, and he brought the vital spirit of this artwork into his
early sculpture. This effort was often ridiculed by his instructors, and
in his first year at the Royal College one of his teachers remarked,
"this young man has been feeding on garbage." He was also deeply
influenced by the semi-abstract paintings of Paul Cezanne, such as the Large Bathers
(1900-1905), which shows monumental reclining nudes integrated into an
abstract landscape. The reclining human figure would become a central
theme in Moore's sculpture.
After graduating from the Royal
College in 1924, he traveled and taught art and in 1928 was given his
first one-man exhibition at the Warren Gallery in London. Appreciated by
his fellow avant-garde artists but lacking a wider public audience,
Moore taught to support himself as he continued to develop his art. His
first major mature work was Reclining Figure in Wood (1936), a highly abstract depiction of the human form. That year, Moore was included in the "Cubism and Abstract Art" show at New York City's Museum of Modern Art, which became an important patron of the English artist.

During World War II,
Moore's studio was damaged by bombs, and sculpture material was
difficult to come by. He turned to drawing and as a commissioned war
artist produced a series of drawings of Londoners huddled in the
underground bomb shelters. The Shelter Drawings (1940) seemed to
capture the spirit of the times and brought Moore his first great fame.
In 1946, he was given a major retrospective by the Museum of Modern Art,
and in 1948 he won the Grand Prize for Sculpture at the 24th Venice
Biennale. From thereon, Moore's reputation was firmly established, and
he began to receive major public commissions for sculptures in bronze
and marble.

In addition to the reclining figure, other common
themes of Moore's sculpture include the mother and child, family groups,
and fallen warriors. Among his major commissions were sculptures for
UNESCO headquarters in Paris (1957-58), for Lincoln Center in New York
City (1963-65), for the University of Chicago (1964-66), and for the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
(1978). For the last four decades of his life, he lived
unostentatiously in a farmhouse in Much Hadham, 30 miles north of
London. He died in 1986.